Hello everyone, my name is Moataz, I’m a developer advocate at Bitrise, working within the Growth team.
I started my career as a software engineer 12 years ago. I was always eager to learn and share my knowledge with my connections on different social media, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. I then switched my career and worked as a quality and test engineer, test lead, and Senior SDET. While doing so, I created my Twitter account, personal blog, YouTube channel and started publishing videos and articles related to different topics such as development, test automation, and agile development with different tools and frameworks.
I started creating and delivering different online courses for test automation to help the community to understand the subject and how to use it with different technologies and programming languages.
Finally, I decided to participate in events because they’re a great opportunity to meet new people and build new relationships.
While being on this journey unknowingly for years, I’ve been performing the act of developer advocacy.
What does it mean to be a developer advocate?
A developer advocate (DA) is an engineer, a technical expert, a content creator, a community builder, and much more.
DAs help you use products better, make it easier for you to understand the technology, and relay the community's feedback back to the company to make product improvements.
Basically, developer advocates act as facilitators to empower others to engineer products with ease, acting as a bridge between the engineering team and the developer community by speaking about the newest updates, features, and technology enhancements to the world.
I really love the following iceberg image, which describes the DA role in a nutshell, but ever so accurately.
Image credit: manekinekko
People usually see DAs traveling, attending events, and posting on social media, but actually, there is much more to the role. Behind the scenes, we participate in internal studies, surveys, contribute to internal product development, and collaborate with the whole organization.
How does a typical day look like as a Bitrise DA?
There’s never a boring day when it comes to being a DA for such a fast-paced, dynamic company as Bitrise.
Let me give you an example!
Usually, I start my day by attending our regular stand-up meeting with my awesome team and discussing the current sprint tasks. Then I go on prioritizing the workload for the day and checking my calendar for any meetings related to topics such as community, engineering, or product.
Checking our community Slack channel is a regular daily task, which I never miss, to see if there is anything I can help with or to see if we have any new Experts Program members, who need following up with. I also always keep an eye out on our social media channels to see if there are any questions, comments, or help needed within the network. I have weekly set meetings with our social media team, to ensure we provide the newest updates regularly and brainstorm on the next best ideas for technical posts on our Twitter account.
After I’ve gone through the checking and answering of any questions, I continue by focusing on a particular topic, like preparing a talk for our Bitrise User Groups (BUGs) or creating and recording videos for Bitrise Verified Steps or writing hands-on technical articles related to different mobile technologies and SDKs such as Android CI/CD, iOS UI Testing, Migrating Flutter app from Jenkins to Bitrise, and Cloud Testing with AWS Device Farm (and much more).
If I’ve attended any events (where I might have also spoken), I tend to write a recap article. Or, if there are any large community events coming up such as WWDC or Google IO, I’d prepare some marketing materials.
Depending on the day, I tend to continue working together with our Product teams on any articles, videos, or documents that need creating in relation to a new announcement or new feature on Bitrise, such as our latest announcement about Gen2.
Later during the day, I continue prioritizing my tasks according to what has been set during the sprint and go on working with our Partner team in preparing and recording different videos for our platform, such as Bitrise Verified Steps or meeting with our community members and our dedicated Steps team to discuss open-source projects.
Of course, not all days are this busy! Any free time allows me to continue learning about our product, speaking to our community members, building rapport and growing the community. I also love to take the time to tap into creating Bitrise Steps, testing upcoming features internally and more.
As I mentioned earlier: there’s never a boring day!
Sounds interesting?
Great! Because we are looking for an experienced, impact-driven, and enthusiastic developer advocate to build, lead, and grow our developer community alongside the Customer Marketing team. This newly formed role will understand our product, customers, and market to engage, inform, and bridge the gap between our community and the broader commercial organization to make Bitrise the place where mobile product teams excel.
Do apply if you feel that this role fits your profile and join me on our mission to build and grow the Mobile DevOps community for Bitrise around the world.
What makes a truly outstanding developer advocate?
I believe that to be a successful DA you should be:
- A continuous and quick learner: to be able to advocate the developer always with the best practices.
- Building real-world applications with the product: to know under the hood and know the big picture of the product.
- An effective communicator and sharer of knowledge: to build trust with the community.
Here’s a pro tip about being a developer advocate at Bitrise —, simply do the following:
- Code a sample app.
- Publish a blog post to show how you built it.
- Build a demo script from the blog post.
- Record a video of your demo.
- Assemble a presentation from content.
- Present it at meetups and conferences.
Always be eager to learn and explore new things. It’s not only about learning new technologies but also building skills that are invaluable such as how to develop trust, grow communities, and effectively communicate.
Keep growing, keep learning, and stay safe!
